Do3 - Trilogy of 'Money Talks' plays

[french frank]

12 June: Serious Money: Caryl Churchill's dramatic satire of the financial excesses and corporate venality that followed the 1986 Big Bang is the first of three plays in Radio 3's "Money Talks" season.

It is followed in subsequent weeks in the "Money Talks" season by new productions of Edward Bulwer-Lytton's nineteenth century satire about inherited wealth, 'Money' and George Bernard Shaw's play "Widowers' Houses" about the moral contradictions of business. As part of "Money Talks", The Essay "It Talks" chronicles the rise of money in human civilisation from cattle wealth to flexible plastic and The Sunday Feature "Europe, the Art of Austerity" explores artistic response to hard times,

[french frank]

Did anyone listen to 'Serious Money'? I hope to do so as the start of a completist listening to the trilogy. The Bulwer-Lytton will be interesting.

[aeolium]

Did anyone listen to 'Serious Money'?

I did, and enjoyed it, though I rather failed to keep up with the plot as I was interested in the language - it's written mostly in rhyming couplets. It had good pace and a Hogarthian mix of city characters. I want to listen to it again so as to get more of an idea as to what was going on.

[aeolium]

Did anyone listen to the Bulwer-Lytton play on Sunday? I was out at a concert but will try to listen on I-player if anyone thinks it is worth hearing. All I know of B-L is that quote "Beneath the rule of men entirely great, the pen is mightier than the sword" from his play about Richelieu.

[DracoM]

Yes, I think it is worth a listen. Structurally it's rubbish, but as an insight into money talking, money ruining, money snarling up relationships of all kinds, it's as modern as modern.

And, anyway, it's worth hearing for Ian MacDiarmid's fantastic performance as the comic/evil, scheming, thwarted dad using his airhead daughter as a commodity. Real Ian Richardson House of Cards territory.

[french frank]

I'm very cross that I let the Caryl Churchill play slip by without catching it (when will R3 drama catch up with podcasts?), but I certainly shan't miss this one.

Thanks for the reminder.

Courtesy of Wikipedia: "He coined the phrases "the great unwashed" , "pursuit of the almighty dollar", "the pen is mightier than the sword", and the famous opening line "It was a dark and stormy night".

That makes it unmissable, especially the final quote!

[cavatina]

I did, and enjoyed it, though I rather failed to keep up with the plot as I was interested in the language - it's written mostly in rhyming couplets. It had good pace and a Hogarthian mix of city characters. I want to listen to it again so as to get more of an idea as to what was going on.

Agreed! I thought it was great fun to try to improvise a following rhyming line in real-time.
I'm looking forward to the rest in the series, too...thank goodness for the I-player!

[tony yyy]

I'm afraid I thought it (Serious Money, that is) was rather tedious and it was only the rhyming couplets that provided any interest at all for me. Surely even in the 1980s everyone assumed that bankers and anyone involved in the stock exchange were greedy and had dubious morals, so it hardly seems like cutting-edge satire.

[aeolium]

I'm afraid I thought it (Serious Money, that is) was rather tedious and it was only the rhyming couplets that provided any interest at all for me. Surely even in the 1980s everyone assumed that bankers and anyone involved in the stock exchange were greedy and had dubious morals, so it hardly seems like cutting-edge satire.

I think you have to allow for the fact that there was a very different general outlook at the time Serious Money was written in the later eighties from the view that prevails today. At that time deregulation and privatisation were relatively popular. The Tories won a hefty victory in 1987 and for the middle classes (and for the rich) the economy seemed to be improving. Yes, there was lampooning (e.g. 'Loadsamoney') of banking spivs, but I don't recall many concerns being expressed about the end of the separation between traditional retail banking and merchant banking - although that deregulation ended up in the financial catastrophe of 2008. I thought SM was more than just a jokey look at skulduggery and backstabbing in the financial world - there were also examples of deals that made millions for the financiers yet had disastrous consequences for communities.

Anyway, I'm always inclined to be more tolerant when playwrights write about their own times rather than the endless stream of historical plays, biodramas etc.

[french frank]

Yes, I think it is worth a listen. Structurally it's rubbish, but as an insight into money talking, money ruining, money snarling up relationships of all kinds, it's as modern as modern.

Yes, I'd agree - worth a listen. It's actually barely 'Victorian', though it seems sometimes to be billed as that. At times some of the OTT performances even seemed to hark back to Restoration comedy (what had there been in the 18th c., btw? not a lot?).

The various attitudes to money were woven quite entertainingly into a story of changing fortunes (monetary and other), with Blake Ritson (as Evelyn) never convincingly throwing off his nice guy image and Clara's grounds for refusing him at the beginning interesting: it was almost a matter of 'duty' for a future wife to contribute to husband's prosperity by bringing a reasonable fortune with her.

This production made quite a good adaptation though I can't say whether it was an undeniable improvement on the original (I wonder whether it would have seemed over long).

[aeolium]

I did manage to listen to the Bulwer-Lytton and it was reasonably enjoyable without being memorable in any way. The style was strange - more Regency than Victorian and it must have sounded quite archaic even when it was first performed in 1840. Ian McDiarmid seemed to be trying to copy the late Ian Richardson as Sir John Vesey and I thought Roger Allam was miscast as the grieving widower - he would have been better as Sir John. Bertie Carvel seems to have taken over from Joseph Kloska as the Drama on 3 regular.

Not as good, for me, as the Caryl Churchill play.

[Russ]

Caryl Churchill's Serious Money gets another airing this coming Sunday.

Russ